Kissinger’s Shadow (26 page)

Kissinger watched all of this with amusement. In a way, Clinton was following his lead: he was bombing a country we weren't at war with without congressional approval, and one of the reasons he was doing so was to placate the militarist right. For example, in 1997 Clinton tried to appoint Anthony Lake, the former NSC staffer who in 1970 resigned because of his opposition to the invasion of Cambodia, as CIA director. Lake faced resistance in the Senate from many Republicans and more than a few Democrats because he came from the (mildly) dissenting wing of the foreign policy establishment. He not only quit the NSC but, in a 1989 book called
Somoza Falling
, described CIA activities in Nicaragua as “covert actions run amok.” To counter opposition to Lake, the Clinton administration in effect repudiated the questioning spirit of the 1970s, giving Kissinger what must have been a gratifying vindication. According to the
New York Times
, the White House tried to sell Lake to Congress “as a man so tough-minded that he lost no sleep when a United States missile aimed at Iraqi intelligence headquarters went awry and killed civilians in 1994.”
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It didn't help.
*
During three days of confirmation hearings, Lake was grilled on everything from his opinion of the Vietnam War to his having listened to protest music in 1970, with his resignation from Kissinger's NSC over Cambodia painted as “unpatriotic.” Lake withdrew his nomination.
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*   *   *

Kissinger gave a full airing of his opinion of Clinton's bombing of Iraq shortly after Pol Pot died, in 1998. At a conference commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the accords that ended the Vietnam War,
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he started, appropriately enough, with Cambodia, defending his actions there, before turning the discussion to Clinton and Iraq:

I talked with some Clinton Administration person recently when the bombing of Iraq was being contemplated. I said that, in my view, we ought to go after the Republican Guard divisions. “Oh, my God,” he said. “Republican Guard divisions? You can't go after the Republican Guard divisions. What we're accusing Iraq of is hiding biological weapons. We can go after every deposit of biological weapons. But we can't go after things that are outside our legal framework.”

Washington, Kissinger went on, has to “be able to bring” its “political and military objectives into some relationship to each other.” Weapons of mass destruction aren't really what is at stake in Iraq, he said. The real “problem” is our motivation, or will. “The issue is, do we have a strategy for breaking the back of somebody we don't want to negotiate with? And if we're not able to do that, how can we then avoid negotiating with him? If we are not able to destroy and we are not able to isolate him, we're only going to demonstrate our impotence.”

It's that “strategic concept”—the need to be
willing
to break the back of somebody you refuse to negotiate with—that governed what he and Nixon were trying to accomplish in Southeast Asia. “Whether we got it right or not,” Kissinger said, “is really secondary.”

“Whether we got it right or not, is really secondary.” It's not really a remarkable statement, at least not when one considers Kissinger's long-standing insistence that the demonstrative effects produced by one's act of will are more important than the consequences of that act. In any case, Kissinger then made an easy transition from defending his bombing of Cambodia to advising Clinton to bomb Iraq even more. “That approach,” he said, referring to the need to align one's military actions with one's political objective, “is the one we still need.”

And if Clinton did escalate, what would matter would be the effect more bombing would have not on Iraq but on the United States. Escalation, Kissinger said, would force us to answer this question: “Are we willing to pay this price? And if we are not willing to pay the price, we are back to the Vietnam syndrome of not being able to order our objectives.” If we were willing to pay the price, to project the required military force to achieve our goals and to finish what we started, we would be able to overcome our impotence.

At this point, in 1998, Kissinger's opinions are nearly indistinguishable from those of Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, and other neoconservatives who were then laying the ideological groundwork for the 2003 drive into Iraq. Here is Wolfowitz in 2000, praising Clinton for bombing Iraq without congressional sanction but criticizing him for doing it without a clear sense of purpose: “American forces under President Clinton's command have been bombing Iraq with some regularity for months now,” Wolfowitz wrote, without “a whimper of opposition in the Congress and barely a mention in the press.”
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And not just Iraq. “Everyone has become a ‘hawk,'” he wrote, cheering Clinton's use of “armed forces in operations involving tens of thousands of troops in Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq—and to conduct military strikes against Afghanistan and Sudan.”
*

But, Wolfowitz said, the problem with this new militarism was that it was born out of softness, not hardness, out of “complacency bred by our current predominance.” It came too easy and had no real costs. There were, he wrote, in what almost sounded like a complaint, “virtually no American casualties” in Clinton's wars. Clinton did bomb. But his bombing was “facile and complacent,” lacking focus. Without a threat that could galvanize America out of its prosperity-induced smugness, we would never be able, to return to Kissinger's phrase, to “order our objectives.”

Wolfowitz's opinion that post–Cold War America was too complacent was shared by William Kristol and Robert Kagan, who in an earlier, influential essay published in
Foreign Affairs,
wrote:

Somehow most Americans have failed to notice that they have never had it so good. They have never lived in a world more conducive to their fundamental interests in a liberal international order.… And that is the problem.… Today the lack of a visible threat to U.S. vital interests or to world peace has tempted Americans to absentmindedly dismantle the material and spiritual foundations on which their national well-being has been based.… The ubiquitous post–Cold War question—where is the threat?—is thus misconceived. In a world in which peace and American security depend on American power and the will to use it, the main threat the United States faces now and in the future is its own weakness.
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The echo of Kissinger is clear: power is weakness unless one is willing to use it. There is, however, a subtle difference worth pointing out. In the past, Kissinger tended to focus on
our
actions as the galvanizing agent:
we
had to take a tough stand;
we
had to act furiously;
we
needed to avoid inaction to prove that action was possible. His discussion of dangers the United States faced tended to be abstract, represented as disorder or instability. He never amped the danger into a primal threat to the nation's existence. Post–Cold War militarists, in contrast, stressed the external menace as the animator, an existential evil that lurks beyond our border whose function seems to be to remind us that existential evil lurks beyond our border. It was 9/11 that brought the two positions together.

THE SECOND GULF WAR AND BEYOND

Between 1998 and the fall of 2001, the fight against radical Islam was not high on the list of reasons neoconservatives said we needed to carry out regime change in Iraq. Some invoked national security, insisting that Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction. Others said the arrangement left in place by the first Gulf War had become unsustainable. A decade of lobbing missiles into Iraq, killing innocents, and enforcing punitive sanctions had destabilized the region, created an unsustainable situation that was captured in the callous comment by Secretary of State Albright that half a million starving Iraqi children was a price worth paying to contain Hussein.
*
America's policy toward the whole region had to change, but for that to happen, the region first had to change. And for the region to change, Saddam Hussein had to go. The solution to the problem created by the first Gulf War was a second Gulf War.

Then 9/11 happened, producing, among policy and opinion makers, a perfect marriage of strategy (what to do with the Middle East) and sentiment (the stimulant that comes from confronting an existential threat).
*

Kissinger was an early supporter of a bold military response to 9/11. On August 9, 2002, he openly endorsed the policy of “regime change” in Iraq in his syndicated column, acknowledging that such a policy was “revolutionary.” “The notion of justified pre-emption,” he wrote, “runs counter to modern international law.” That revolution is necessary, he argued, because of the novelty of the “terrorist threat,” which “transcends the nation-state.” But, Kissinger said, “there is another, generally unstated, reason for bringing matters to a head with Iraq”: to “demonstrate that a terrorist challenge or a systemic attack on the international order also produces catastrophic consequences for the perpetrators, as well as their supporters.”
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That secular Baathists were the enemies of Islamic jihadists and that Iraq neither perpetrated 9/11 nor supported the perpetrators of 9/11 didn't enter into the equation. After all, being “right or not is really secondary” to the main issue: being willing to do something.

Less than three weeks later, on August 26, 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney, who during the Ford presidency had repeatedly sidelined Kissinger, laid out his full case for why the United States had to invade Iraq, speaking before the national convention of Veterans of Foreign Wars. “As former Secretary of State Kissinger recently stated,” said Cheney, directly quoting Kissinger's column, there is “an imperative for pre-emptive action.”
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Judging from his writings, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon invigorated Kissinger, bringing him close to the neocon position that an external threat might clear away the main obstacle to an effective foreign policy: weak-willed domestic opinion. He did, though, worry that the window of opportunity wouldn't stay open long. He advised Bush to act fast “while the memory of the attack on the United States is still vivid and American-deployed forces are available to back up the diplomacy.”
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Kissinger announced that “time is of the essence,” as it always is in such cases. Specifically, in September 2002, he urged the White House to follow up its “success” in Afghanistan by launching what he called “phase two” of a global antiterrorist campaign. The removal of Saddam Hussein from power would be just the beginning of this phase. “The issue is not whether Iraq was involved in the terrorist attack on the United States,” he wrote, brushing away distractions. Rather, he said, the United States needed to “return Iraq to a responsible role in the region.” After that was done, the United States needed to move on to “the destruction of the global terrorist network.” Kissinger identified Somalia and Yemen as possible targets.
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Kissinger, as he did when he made the case for action in Panama and Kuwait, avoided making moral or idealist arguments to justify what he was now envisioning as global war. But there was no way to launch the kind of expansive, never-ending response he was promoting that wouldn't have resulted in an inflation of justifications. Recall George H. W. Bush's “Keystone Kops” stumbling into democracy promotion to validate the quick invasion of Panama, a minor and relatively inconsequential country. What started out as an execution of a warrant for Manuel Noriega's arrest evolved, within just a few months, into the wild-fire advance of a “great principle,” a “revolutionary idea.” The same inflation occurred in Iraq on a greater scale, especially once it was found that Hussein wasn't actually hiding weapons of mass destruction.

*   *   *

In 2005, about two and a half years after the United States attacked Iraq, Michael Gerson, Bush's speechwriter, went to visit Kissinger in New York.
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This was after Fallujah and Abu Ghraib, after the Blackwater massacres and the torture, after it became clear that the real beneficiary of the US invasion of Iraq would be revolutionary Iran, after revelations about cooking the intelligence and manipulating the press in order to neutralize opposition to the invasion. It was that strange, surreal moment when public support for the war was plummeting and Bush's justifications for waging the war were expanding. America's “responsibility,” Bush announced earlier that year at his second inaugural address, was to “rid the world of evil.”

Gerson helped write that speech and he asked Kissinger what he thought of it. “At first I was appalled,” Kissinger said, but then he came to appreciate it for instrumental reasons. “On reflection,” as Bob Woodward recounted the conversation in
State of Denial
, Kissinger “now believed the speech served a purpose and was a very smart move, setting the war on terror and overall U.S. foreign policy in the context of American values. That would help sustain a long campaign.” Means and ends. Ends and means. Realism to idealism and back again.

Kissinger, at that meeting, gave Gerson a copy of an infamous memo he wrote for Nixon in 1969 and asked him to pass it along to Bush. “Withdrawal of U.S. troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public,” Kissinger warned Nixon. “The more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded.” Don't get caught in that trap, Kissinger told Gerson, for once withdrawals start, it will become “harder and harder to maintain the morale of those who remain, not to speak of their mothers.”

Kissinger then reminisced about Vietnam, reminding Gerson that incentives offered through negotiations needed to be backed up by credible threats—and that for the former to be effective the latter had to be unrestrained. He recounted one of the many “major” ultimatums he gave to the North Vietnamese, warning of the “dire consequences” they would face if they didn't make the concessions needed for the United States to withdraw from Vietnam with honor. They didn't.